An Extra Thousand Council Homes To Be Built in Hounslow Borough
Mayor gives a grant of £63 million as part of London-wide funding of a billion pounds
Affordable housing planned for the Brentford area
An extra 1,000 new Council homes could be built in the London Borough of Hounslow due to a grant being given by the Mayor of London made possible by funding given by central Government.
Sadiq Khan has announced his ‘Building Council Homes for Londoners’ which is an initiative in which over £1billion is being given to local authorities across the capital to support the building of more homes that will be available at social rent levels.
Councillor Steve Curran, Leader of Hounslow Council, said, “The Mayor of London’s announcement of allocating £63million to Hounslow Council as part of its ‘Building Council Homes for Londoners’ grant funding is great news for Hounslow. It’s good news for our residents, communities and for the Council’s house building programme. This will give Hounslow a massive boost and greater certainty for delivering our housing pledge of building 5,000 new homes by 2022. The funding will provide 1,000 new Council homes for local people to reduce the number of people on our housing waiting list and achieve our goal of delivering good quality homes for our residents.”
Cllr John Todd who represents Chiswick Homefields ward said, "Of course our Conservative group are delighted to see Hounslow Council receiving £63,252,000 of government funds via the GLA and having the opportunity of bidding for an additional £750,000 of government funds to enhance our busy Planning Department.
"Cllr Steve Curran mentions this funding will lead to an additional 1000 homes whilst the GLA press release mentions 741. We have already probed the LBH much lauded undertaking to provide 5000 homes in the next four years and have serious reservations about the credibility of this promise.
"In particular the LBH Lampton property trading company has since its launch in 2016 when it undertook to provide hundreds of homes and a profit has made no profit and only purchased seven properties and is currently building only 27 flats.
"Its loan facility of circa £50million remains unused as does government provided New Homes Bonus funds which earlier this year with available right to buy funds was in excess of £20million.
It's clear that an urgent radical review is required as to the capability of Hounslow Council to build much required houses".
Overall the funding is expected to result in the delivery of more than 11,000 new homes at social rent levels over the next four year. In addition there would be a further 3,570 other homes, including those for London Living Rent. ‘Building Council Homes for Londoners’ is the first-ever City Hall programme dedicated to council homebuilding. When the Mayor launched the programme in May, it set a target for 10,000 new homes – and due to high levels of interest from boroughs allocations for 11,154 new council homes have been agreed.
Council homebuilding fell to nearly zero in the 1990s, and many councils’ ambition to provide more homes has been held back by a lack of resources and rigid limits on their powers and borrowing. To help them boost their homebuilding plans, the Mayor says he is offering councils more funding – that he secured from Government for social rent earlier this year. He is also offering support, including an innovative way to help them reinvest their receipts from homes sold under Right to Buy.
The plans announced this Tuesday (23 October) will see councils increase their building rates over the next four years to a total estimated at five times greater than over the previous four years.
The Mayor has said that the Prime Minister’s recent announcement that councils would be allowed to borrow more will not fix the housing crisis – and said the capital needs an estimated £2.7 billion per year to build all the council, social rented, and other genuinely affordable homes required in London.
Sadiq Khan, said, “London’s housing crisis is hugely complex and has been decades in the making. There is no simple fix – but council housing is the most important part of the solution. Londoners need more council homes that they can genuinely afford, and local authorities have a fundamental role to play in getting London building the homes we need for the future.
“Today, City Hall is using money we secured from Government to help councils go much further. It is welcome that the Prime Minister has recently listened to calls that I and others have long made for councils to be able to borrow more to build. But let me be clear: lifting the borrowing cap for councils must be just the first step of reform, not the last.
“We need at least four times the amount of money we currently get from Government for new social and affordable homes, and we need far greater powers to step in and buy land for new council housing. The scale of what I have announced today shows the ambition is there in London to build a new generation of council homes – Ministers now urgently need to step up and go the distance too.”
In addition to funding, the Building Council Homes for Londoners programme offers boroughs an innovative way to ringfence their Right to Buy receipts to invest in new homes, alongside expertise and resources from City Hall to increase the size of their homebuilding programmes. It sits alongside the Homebuilding Capacity Fund, announced Friday 19 October, a £10 million fund which allows boroughs to bid for up to £750,000 each to help boost their housing and planning teams.
October 25, 2018